Re: [Fwd: FORTUNE.com: 2/19/1999 - Valley Life: Which Comes

Mike Masnick (mike@techdirt.com)
Sun, 21 Feb 1999 11:50:56 -0800


I am so sick of the web calendaring business being "the next big thing"...
There are too many companies doing it, and none of them have a very
distinct business model or idea. The best, that I've found, has been
when.com because they include events and book releases, and other stuff as
opposed to just your own personal appointments.

That article is amusing in that I wonder how the guy plans to compete with
any of the following companies. I also have discovered that I immediately
distrust anyone who is founding their own company saying "well, it's a $xx
billion market". Don't tell me that. Tell me how you will capture your
slice. I don't need to know the size of the overall market. I need to
know the size that your business will do. These days I'm almost
embarrassed to mention that I work for an internet startup. It's like
living in Hollywood and saying you're an actor or that you've written a
screenplay....

Online calendaring companies:
http://www.when.com/
http://www.jump.com/
http://calendar.yahoo.com/ (used to be webcal)
http://www.visto.com/
http://www.anyday.com/
http://www.magicaldesk.com/
http://digital.daytimer.com/ (yes, the planner company)
http://www.appoint.net/
http://www.supercalendar.com/
http://www.calendars.net/
and, of course: http://www.planetall.com/

I assume there are plenty more, as well. It's not that this is a bad idea,
it's just that there are way too many players, and none of them have
anything special. If anything, it's an interesting product idea, but it's
not a business idea. I expect that one of three things will happen to
almost all of these: (1) they get bought by a bigger player (as a few
already have) who wants to add online calendars to their suite of services
(2) they change their business model (or their entire business - as
jump.com did to become jump.com after being both microcontent.com and
clockwise.com prior to this) or (3) they just go out of business.

-Mike

At 09:25 AM 2/21/99 -0800, Gregory Alan Bolcer wrote:
>Heck, you don't have to have a product to get an IPO. This story is
>interesting as they company they mention talks about providing calendaring
>services to people on the WWW. How many people would want their private
>scheduling information stored by some 3rd party? They'd probably sell
>it to the advertisers and marketers in order to get you trip coupons.
>
>Greg
>
>-------- Original Message --------
>Subject: FORTUNE.com: 2/19/1999 - Valley Life: Which Comes First--the
Product or the IPO?
>Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1999 00:44:18 -0800
>From: M Bolcer <mbolcer@earthlink.net>
>To: "Gregory A. Bolcer" <gbolcer@endeavors.org>
>
>Greg:
>IPO's on the light side.
>Dad
>http://cgi.pathfinder.com/fortune/technology/daily/
>